Earlier this week, I was thinking idly of some of the weird TV I watched as a kid and how hard most of it is to find anywhere. If you’re a ‘90s kid, your whole television childhood still lives somewhere on TV or a streaming service, most likely, and the odds go up with every new Peacock or HBO Max that gets created.
But if you’re a ‘70s kid? A lot of that stuff seems to have no real current commercial value. I mentioned one of the shows on Twitter, an NBC series called Cliff Hangers, wondering how it would look if I could see it now and compare it to my memory, bemoaning the odds of that actually happening.
That led to all sorts of conversations, and one of my collector friends ended up turning up three shows that I haven’t seen since they originally aired, and I’ve sampled all three now. Cliff Hangers is a mess, but it’s little wonder eight-year-old me was fascinated by it. Underground aliens, vampires, and Susan Anton. What’s not to love for a kid? Tenspeed & Brown Shoe isn’t a cop show, which is what I thought it was, but I definitely remember the chemistry between Ben Vereen and young weird Jeff Goldblum.
The real treat for me was Best of the West, a sitcom starring Joel Grey that was clearly hoping to catch a little of that Blazing Saddles tailwind but with an ABC-TV sitcom sensibility. I was a big Mork & Mindy fan at that age, and Best of the West was the show right after it, which meant I was there for every episode. James Burrows is one of the main directors in the first season, and it’s made by a bunch of the guys who also worked on Taxi and Cheers and so many of the big hits of the era. It’s fast and silly and the thing I remembered most about it from when I was a kid was Tracey Walter as Frog, the dim-witted henchman to the show’s main bad guy. Sure enough, he’s a non-stop delight, stealing every scene he’s in, and the show’s a mild-mannered charmer overall. I was glad to see that it was at least somewhat true to what I remembered.
With stuff you haven’t seen in 30 or 40 years, there’s always some detail that stuck that is the reason you remember something. There are plenty of terrible shows that I don’t randomly remember or track down to take another look at, so why do some shows stick? Are there shows you remember that you can’t easily watch now? If so, what are they, and why do you remember them?
It’s Saturday, and that means it’s time for any conversation you guys want to have, so the questions above are just a jumping-off point. Hope your weeks are going well and that you’re nowhere near that madness in Tulsa tonight.
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Quantum Leap. I’m a 90s kid. I remember as a kid being obsessed with the inconsistencies regarding whether Sam had leaped into someone’s body or if Sam was replacing them and people only saw a projection. How can he feel pregnancy but then also stand up in a legless man! Cmon! I didn’t yet know that the writers just didn’t care :)
There was a short-lived fantasy series called Wizards and Warriors in the early ‘80s. The church I went to as a kid had a carving in the altar that always reminded me of the visual effect when the evil wizard would appear/disappear. So I’d sit in church, for years after the series ended, and think about the evil wizard appearing and disappearing. Anyway, I don’t go to church anymore.
Canadian series called Lexx. It was a weird and wonderful sci/fi romp and it was only shown late at night on cable, so sneaking around to make sure my parents didn't catch me was probably half the fun.
The TV shows I think I remember most vividly from my childhood that standout as, "Why was I watching those so young?" are "WKRP" and "Soap." I don't really remember any of the kids shows I watched (other than "Fraggle Rock" and "Muppet Babies"), but I remember watching a lot of sitcoms with my parents, and those were the two that stand out as ones I'd still really enjoy revisiting now; my teens and 20s TV watching is what sticks out more, like "Buffy," "The Simpsons" and "Futurama."
I finally watched "When They See Us" this week on Netflix, and it was filled with empathy and pain in telling the story of the Central Park Five. I've also begun rewatching some Satoshi Kon for a podcast a friend of mine and I are going to do on his work; I always forget just how wild the structure of "Millennium Actress" is until I see it again, and "Perfect Blue" is as perfect a thriller as anyone has made. Other movies I watched this week are "Miller's Crossing," "Crimson Tide," "Venus in Furs," "Police Story," "Inception" and "Kafka."
As an 80's kid there are so many Saturday morning, Sunday morning, and weekday afternoon cartoons that I loved right up until high school. It really was a kind of Golden Age for those kinds of cartoons that built off of the success of the goofy Hannah Barbara shows of the 70's to create some really interesting shows (that were mostly there just to sell toys).
Transformers isn't the masterpiece I remember and neither is Masters of the Universe or GI Joe, but they all told interesting stories with big colorful characters and fun action. I always kinda loved the weird sword & sorcery cartoons that no one seems to remember, like Galtar and the Golden Lance or Thundarr the Barbarian. Thundercats was huge for me, and it was a cartoon that managed to tell these pretty great serialized stories while also doing its bit to sell toys.
By far the best and worst cartoons were Japanese imports. The best was Robotech. I can still watch Robotech today, that's how well-written most of the stories were. Yeah, the Minn May stuff is silly, but most of it holds-up pretty well. The worst was Voltron. The stories were puerile, the action was recycled, and every episode ended with Voltron finally using the blazing sword to kill the robeast. Getting the first season on DVD in 2006 in the steel Blue Lion Box and watching the first disc remains my biggest nostalgia balloon pop ever. Saying I was disappointment is an understatement. If you want to talk about a fantastic use of the reboot power to take a bad show with a cool concept and make it a good show, that's what Dreamworks and Netflix did with their Voltron reboot. I can't recommend that show enough.
For live action, I can watch the goofy shows I loved as an 80's kid, like Buck Rogers, Knight Rider, Air Wolf, and The A-Team and laugh at the silliness. Some of the others really do hold-up well, like Magnum, p.i., MacGyver and Quantum Leap, but there are some shows I remember that I haven't been able to see since then so I don't know if they hold-up well. Like the one where a teenage Jerry O'Connell got superpowers.
I think I grew up in the perfect generation for cartoons and live action prime time TV shows, born in 1980 right at the tail-end of Gen-X. I could watch fun cartoons like Gummi Bears or Ducktales and also, even though still young, appreciate most adult shows like Star Trek: TNG, Family Ties, or The Cosby Show.
I loved Best of the West. Great cast. And from what I can recall, actually funny.
For me it's a lot of the Saturday morning live-action stuff in the early 70's: Land of the Lost (which was very much dissed in the film version); Ark II; Far Out Space Nuts; The Lost Saucer; etc. Some of it just goofy fun.
But Land of the Lost caught my attention the most (plus being 6 and having a crush on Holly/Cathy Coleman helped). It was gold. David Gerrold did a great job with it, keeping it sci-fi based that appealed to kids, but didn't talk down to them. Amazing what they managed to do in 1974.
I found myself recently watching Night Court for the first time since it aired. The first two or three seasons had a silly/goofy charm, but when the focus of the show pivoted to John Laroquette in season four, it lost some of that ensemble snap. I’m not knocking him, he’s a solid actor clearly, but the show changed and it wasn’t necessarily for me. Some of those jokes don’t fly now.
The shows I have revisited in the last few years, because something reminded me to check their IMDb entry...it hasn’t been pointless but 95% of the shows don’t pass my smell test as an adult. I guess the point of nostalgia is to trigger a memory or emotion, and that’s fun in the moment. I just wish the underlying material had held up better...that my memory matched the material.
I'm an 80s kid. For years I thought some shows were just dreams, until I got this big book in the mid-90s, sort of like an Ebert review book, but for TV. Like the 1983 show Wizards and Warriors. Or the Chad Lowe show Spencer. I had a strange attraction to Chad Lowe at that age.
For me it’s the Filmation animated programs and live action shows from the late 1960’s and 1970’s (yes I’m that old I watched it on ABC and CBS on Saturday mornings when it was first run)
Their animated shows always seemed to look more “adult” and the artwork always looked better than the Hanna Barbera shows. They had well known stuff - Batman, Superman, and other DC heroes, Star Trek, The Brady Kids, Archie, Fat Albert, but my favorite was a TV adaption of “Fantastic Voyage”. It had almost nothing in common with the movie- the miniaturized team were futuristic spies trying to stop threats against the USA. Ted Knight voiced the team leader, but what stood out to me was the design of the ship they flew around in “The Voyager” and the music which was loud and brassy and sounded like John Barry music from a James Bond movie.
Over the years I’ve repurchased on eBay the show merchandise I had as a kid (Aurora model of the ship, board game, View master reels) and even found a few original animation production cels. But best of all found an official Region 2 DVD of the show that looks amazing (must be from an original source). I still binge watch it occasionally (there only 16 eps) and it still holds up
They also did a really good adaptation of “Flash Gordon” that came out the year before the Sam Jones movie and is a very good version of the Alex Raymond stories. It’s done absolutely straight and is not campy at all. Back then I liked it better than the movie (which to me at the time just seemed way to silly and dumb)
I was briefly in love in 1987 with an odd sci-fi action show called The Highwayman starring Flash Gordon lead Sam Jones, V actress Jane Badler, and, of course, Jacko, a burly Aussie briefly famous for Energizer ads. The two male leads drove a cool but massive and unwieldy megatruck while fighting vaguely futuristic crime.
Voyagers! introduced me to the joy of sci fi, and V (the mini-series) captivated me with the sci fi scares. After those, I was hooked into fandom for life.
Wow. I also remember Cliff Hangers! The only thing is that I saw was what would be the last aired episode, but even at my young age, I knew something was up because the Dracula series ended and left the others still unresolved. So there I was waiting for an episode that never came. Sigh.
If a show had horror or scarier sci-fi elements, I was interested. There are a couple of series I remember either only seeing one episode or just catching a glimpse here and there:
- The Darkroom (1981)
- Something Is Out There (1988)
The one made-for-tv film that really stuck with me was Snowbeast (1977). Even though I've since re-watched this one and realized it's just Jaws with a yeti, along with being padded with about 80% stock skiing footage, the fond memories of a little me staring at the television screen while this one played will never fade.
I'm 50 and I remember Children of the Stones and King of the Castle - two kids shows that forgot they were for kids and overreached to achieve a tone of occult hysteria that stays with me even now. Sapphire and Steel was developed as a kids show but graduated to primetime ITV. It was so unique I was surprised it lasted two series.
A show that has always stuck in my mind for reasons I can't even fathom is something called Nowhere Man. I remember nothing about it other than it had this serialized conspiracy angle that I thought was unique and different at the time, and outside of X-Files wasn't something I had ever really seen before. I just looked it up and it apparently starred Bruce Greenwood which makes me even more intrigued. It's a little bit more recent but I also distinctly remember the show Drive. It starred Nathan Fillion, was created by Tim Minear and was one of the first things both of them did post Firefly. To this day I remember one scene in particular that seemed to suggest WAY more was going on than you first led to believe but the show only aired maybe 3 or 4 episodes at most. I was always bummed the show never got more of a shot because I remember it being pretty good.
Finally, it's far more well known but I REALLY wish it was way easier to find News Radio on one of the streaming services. I know you can buy it but in a world where you can find Friends, The Office, Parks and Rec and almost every other sitcom wherever you turn, it's a shame one of the single greatest sitcoms of all time isn't more readily available. I feel like if they put it on one of the streaming services it would gather a whole new generation of fans.
I don't think there's any contemporary series that I enjoyed in my childhood that I could stomach sitting through now. They were apparently all almost universally terrible. Attempts to revisit some of them have punctured the hazy nostalgia and I'd prefer to remember them fondly. Strangely this doesn't apply to things that were reruns at the time, e.g. the original Star Trek, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Twilight Zone... Those had a different veneer even then. The first shows that I enjoyed at the time and can still enjoy unironically were series I got into as an adult.
My mother got me heavy into mysteries when I was young. In kindergarten I was reading Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys. Then CBS debuted the series Scene of the Crime, hosted by Orson Welles. Being in kindergarten, I had no idea who Orson Welles was, but the premise was great. The show was an anthology, but they retained the same cast from week to week, all playing different roles (that must have been amazingly satisfying for the actors). The gimmick was that they would layer in clues for the audience and Orson would show up and speak directly too us, allowing us time to announce who we thought 'done it' that week.
It was incredibly exciting for me. At that age, I wasn't very good at logical deduction. At least not as good as my mother, but I did learn. It's weird but that little TV show did as much to teach me about narrative conventions than just about anything else. Sadly it lasted only a few episodes before the canceled. I think they brought it back in the early 90s, but I never watched any of those.
In my memory, it seems that mysteries were fairly popular in the culture of the mid 80s. Anybody else remember this? Do you remember the Clue VHS game? Our neighbor had that. Made for some fun entertainment after the weekend BBQs.
I’m 53, and the one show I remembered loving form the 70’s was a TV show called SWAT. It doesn’t hold up as well now, and that bubble has definitely been burst. Also loved Six Million Dollar Man, and the Bionic Woman. I have fond memories of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. I LOVED both V mini-series, but was disappointed by the series that followed. I also grew up loving ABC’s Tuesday night lineup of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Three’s Company. Three’s company couldn’t be made today, but was popular at the time. Also loved The Carol Burnett Show. I could go on, so many memories.
Quantum Leap. I’m a 90s kid. I remember as a kid being obsessed with the inconsistencies regarding whether Sam had leaped into someone’s body or if Sam was replacing them and people only saw a projection. How can he feel pregnancy but then also stand up in a legless man! Cmon! I didn’t yet know that the writers just didn’t care :)
There was a short-lived fantasy series called Wizards and Warriors in the early ‘80s. The church I went to as a kid had a carving in the altar that always reminded me of the visual effect when the evil wizard would appear/disappear. So I’d sit in church, for years after the series ended, and think about the evil wizard appearing and disappearing. Anyway, I don’t go to church anymore.
Canadian series called Lexx. It was a weird and wonderful sci/fi romp and it was only shown late at night on cable, so sneaking around to make sure my parents didn't catch me was probably half the fun.
I hope everyone is safe and healthy this week.
The TV shows I think I remember most vividly from my childhood that standout as, "Why was I watching those so young?" are "WKRP" and "Soap." I don't really remember any of the kids shows I watched (other than "Fraggle Rock" and "Muppet Babies"), but I remember watching a lot of sitcoms with my parents, and those were the two that stand out as ones I'd still really enjoy revisiting now; my teens and 20s TV watching is what sticks out more, like "Buffy," "The Simpsons" and "Futurama."
I finally watched "When They See Us" this week on Netflix, and it was filled with empathy and pain in telling the story of the Central Park Five. I've also begun rewatching some Satoshi Kon for a podcast a friend of mine and I are going to do on his work; I always forget just how wild the structure of "Millennium Actress" is until I see it again, and "Perfect Blue" is as perfect a thriller as anyone has made. Other movies I watched this week are "Miller's Crossing," "Crimson Tide," "Venus in Furs," "Police Story," "Inception" and "Kafka."
As an 80's kid there are so many Saturday morning, Sunday morning, and weekday afternoon cartoons that I loved right up until high school. It really was a kind of Golden Age for those kinds of cartoons that built off of the success of the goofy Hannah Barbara shows of the 70's to create some really interesting shows (that were mostly there just to sell toys).
Transformers isn't the masterpiece I remember and neither is Masters of the Universe or GI Joe, but they all told interesting stories with big colorful characters and fun action. I always kinda loved the weird sword & sorcery cartoons that no one seems to remember, like Galtar and the Golden Lance or Thundarr the Barbarian. Thundercats was huge for me, and it was a cartoon that managed to tell these pretty great serialized stories while also doing its bit to sell toys.
By far the best and worst cartoons were Japanese imports. The best was Robotech. I can still watch Robotech today, that's how well-written most of the stories were. Yeah, the Minn May stuff is silly, but most of it holds-up pretty well. The worst was Voltron. The stories were puerile, the action was recycled, and every episode ended with Voltron finally using the blazing sword to kill the robeast. Getting the first season on DVD in 2006 in the steel Blue Lion Box and watching the first disc remains my biggest nostalgia balloon pop ever. Saying I was disappointment is an understatement. If you want to talk about a fantastic use of the reboot power to take a bad show with a cool concept and make it a good show, that's what Dreamworks and Netflix did with their Voltron reboot. I can't recommend that show enough.
For live action, I can watch the goofy shows I loved as an 80's kid, like Buck Rogers, Knight Rider, Air Wolf, and The A-Team and laugh at the silliness. Some of the others really do hold-up well, like Magnum, p.i., MacGyver and Quantum Leap, but there are some shows I remember that I haven't been able to see since then so I don't know if they hold-up well. Like the one where a teenage Jerry O'Connell got superpowers.
I think I grew up in the perfect generation for cartoons and live action prime time TV shows, born in 1980 right at the tail-end of Gen-X. I could watch fun cartoons like Gummi Bears or Ducktales and also, even though still young, appreciate most adult shows like Star Trek: TNG, Family Ties, or The Cosby Show.
I loved Best of the West. Great cast. And from what I can recall, actually funny.
For me it's a lot of the Saturday morning live-action stuff in the early 70's: Land of the Lost (which was very much dissed in the film version); Ark II; Far Out Space Nuts; The Lost Saucer; etc. Some of it just goofy fun.
But Land of the Lost caught my attention the most (plus being 6 and having a crush on Holly/Cathy Coleman helped). It was gold. David Gerrold did a great job with it, keeping it sci-fi based that appealed to kids, but didn't talk down to them. Amazing what they managed to do in 1974.
I found myself recently watching Night Court for the first time since it aired. The first two or three seasons had a silly/goofy charm, but when the focus of the show pivoted to John Laroquette in season four, it lost some of that ensemble snap. I’m not knocking him, he’s a solid actor clearly, but the show changed and it wasn’t necessarily for me. Some of those jokes don’t fly now.
The shows I have revisited in the last few years, because something reminded me to check their IMDb entry...it hasn’t been pointless but 95% of the shows don’t pass my smell test as an adult. I guess the point of nostalgia is to trigger a memory or emotion, and that’s fun in the moment. I just wish the underlying material had held up better...that my memory matched the material.
I'm an 80s kid. For years I thought some shows were just dreams, until I got this big book in the mid-90s, sort of like an Ebert review book, but for TV. Like the 1983 show Wizards and Warriors. Or the Chad Lowe show Spencer. I had a strange attraction to Chad Lowe at that age.
For me it’s the Filmation animated programs and live action shows from the late 1960’s and 1970’s (yes I’m that old I watched it on ABC and CBS on Saturday mornings when it was first run)
Their animated shows always seemed to look more “adult” and the artwork always looked better than the Hanna Barbera shows. They had well known stuff - Batman, Superman, and other DC heroes, Star Trek, The Brady Kids, Archie, Fat Albert, but my favorite was a TV adaption of “Fantastic Voyage”. It had almost nothing in common with the movie- the miniaturized team were futuristic spies trying to stop threats against the USA. Ted Knight voiced the team leader, but what stood out to me was the design of the ship they flew around in “The Voyager” and the music which was loud and brassy and sounded like John Barry music from a James Bond movie.
Over the years I’ve repurchased on eBay the show merchandise I had as a kid (Aurora model of the ship, board game, View master reels) and even found a few original animation production cels. But best of all found an official Region 2 DVD of the show that looks amazing (must be from an original source). I still binge watch it occasionally (there only 16 eps) and it still holds up
They also did a really good adaptation of “Flash Gordon” that came out the year before the Sam Jones movie and is a very good version of the Alex Raymond stories. It’s done absolutely straight and is not campy at all. Back then I liked it better than the movie (which to me at the time just seemed way to silly and dumb)
I was briefly in love in 1987 with an odd sci-fi action show called The Highwayman starring Flash Gordon lead Sam Jones, V actress Jane Badler, and, of course, Jacko, a burly Aussie briefly famous for Energizer ads. The two male leads drove a cool but massive and unwieldy megatruck while fighting vaguely futuristic crime.
Voyagers! introduced me to the joy of sci fi, and V (the mini-series) captivated me with the sci fi scares. After those, I was hooked into fandom for life.
For some reason, I’ve always remembered “Committed,” which was on NBC, like, 15 years ago. Not sure if actually dug it or just dug Jennifer Finnigan.
Wow. I also remember Cliff Hangers! The only thing is that I saw was what would be the last aired episode, but even at my young age, I knew something was up because the Dracula series ended and left the others still unresolved. So there I was waiting for an episode that never came. Sigh.
If a show had horror or scarier sci-fi elements, I was interested. There are a couple of series I remember either only seeing one episode or just catching a glimpse here and there:
- The Darkroom (1981)
- Something Is Out There (1988)
The one made-for-tv film that really stuck with me was Snowbeast (1977). Even though I've since re-watched this one and realized it's just Jaws with a yeti, along with being padded with about 80% stock skiing footage, the fond memories of a little me staring at the television screen while this one played will never fade.
I'm 50 and I remember Children of the Stones and King of the Castle - two kids shows that forgot they were for kids and overreached to achieve a tone of occult hysteria that stays with me even now. Sapphire and Steel was developed as a kids show but graduated to primetime ITV. It was so unique I was surprised it lasted two series.
A show that has always stuck in my mind for reasons I can't even fathom is something called Nowhere Man. I remember nothing about it other than it had this serialized conspiracy angle that I thought was unique and different at the time, and outside of X-Files wasn't something I had ever really seen before. I just looked it up and it apparently starred Bruce Greenwood which makes me even more intrigued. It's a little bit more recent but I also distinctly remember the show Drive. It starred Nathan Fillion, was created by Tim Minear and was one of the first things both of them did post Firefly. To this day I remember one scene in particular that seemed to suggest WAY more was going on than you first led to believe but the show only aired maybe 3 or 4 episodes at most. I was always bummed the show never got more of a shot because I remember it being pretty good.
Finally, it's far more well known but I REALLY wish it was way easier to find News Radio on one of the streaming services. I know you can buy it but in a world where you can find Friends, The Office, Parks and Rec and almost every other sitcom wherever you turn, it's a shame one of the single greatest sitcoms of all time isn't more readily available. I feel like if they put it on one of the streaming services it would gather a whole new generation of fans.
Ooh. I forgot to mention 1977's Quark.
I don't think there's any contemporary series that I enjoyed in my childhood that I could stomach sitting through now. They were apparently all almost universally terrible. Attempts to revisit some of them have punctured the hazy nostalgia and I'd prefer to remember them fondly. Strangely this doesn't apply to things that were reruns at the time, e.g. the original Star Trek, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Twilight Zone... Those had a different veneer even then. The first shows that I enjoyed at the time and can still enjoy unironically were series I got into as an adult.
My mother got me heavy into mysteries when I was young. In kindergarten I was reading Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys. Then CBS debuted the series Scene of the Crime, hosted by Orson Welles. Being in kindergarten, I had no idea who Orson Welles was, but the premise was great. The show was an anthology, but they retained the same cast from week to week, all playing different roles (that must have been amazingly satisfying for the actors). The gimmick was that they would layer in clues for the audience and Orson would show up and speak directly too us, allowing us time to announce who we thought 'done it' that week.
It was incredibly exciting for me. At that age, I wasn't very good at logical deduction. At least not as good as my mother, but I did learn. It's weird but that little TV show did as much to teach me about narrative conventions than just about anything else. Sadly it lasted only a few episodes before the canceled. I think they brought it back in the early 90s, but I never watched any of those.
In my memory, it seems that mysteries were fairly popular in the culture of the mid 80s. Anybody else remember this? Do you remember the Clue VHS game? Our neighbor had that. Made for some fun entertainment after the weekend BBQs.
I’m 53, and the one show I remembered loving form the 70’s was a TV show called SWAT. It doesn’t hold up as well now, and that bubble has definitely been burst. Also loved Six Million Dollar Man, and the Bionic Woman. I have fond memories of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. I LOVED both V mini-series, but was disappointed by the series that followed. I also grew up loving ABC’s Tuesday night lineup of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Three’s Company. Three’s company couldn’t be made today, but was popular at the time. Also loved The Carol Burnett Show. I could go on, so many memories.